North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

I’ve heard folks say that there is criminal law . . . and then there is impaired driving law.  What I think they mean is that while impaired driving is, […]

For the past few years, the Section of Community Corrections of the Division of Adult Correction has been transitioning to what they call "evidence-based practices," or EBP. The basic idea is to use series of assessment tools to identify which offenders are mostly likely to reoffend and most in need of programming, and then tailor their supervision accordingly. The process involves some terminology that is probably familiar by now to most probation officers, but may be less familiar to judges, lawyers, and defendants. Today’s post provides an overview of the process probation officers use to sort probationers into different supervision levels and an introduction into what those levels mean for probationers as a practical matter.

I mentioned in this prior post that the 2012 Justice Reinvestment clarifications act, S.L. 2012-188, made changes related to drug trafficking. Specifically, the law amended G.S. 15A-1368.1 to make clear that […]

It’s been over six months since the last update of my sex offender flow chart (the previous version was current as of January 12, 2012). A revised version is now […]

Like most complicated legislation, the Justice Reinvestment Act (JRA) was less than perfectly clear as originally written. Earlier this week (July 16, 2012) the governor signed House Bill 1021, Justice […]

Five years ago, the General Assembly authorized judges to require that defendants placed on probation for a Level One or Level Two impaired driving offense abstain from consuming alcohol for […]

I wrote previously (here) about the post–Justice Reinvestment rules for determining whether a defendant is eligible for a conditional discharge under G.S. 90-96. Those rules are complicated, but my sense […]

Senate Bill 105, which passed both chambers of the General Assembly overwhelmingly and appears certain to become law (either with the Governor’s signature or because of the passage of time […]

The School of Government recently launched the Collateral Consequences Assessment Tool (C-CAT). But, what is a collateral consequence assessment tool? For that matter, what is a collateral consequence? The Collateral […]

I have written before (here) about some of the tricky issues related to extending probation. A recent case from the court of appeals illustrates the complexity of the rules. In […]